At seventy-seven, Pepper Mills is too old to be a stranger in a strange land. She didn’t choose the Vista View Retirement Community of Austin, Texas—that would be her three grown children—but when she grudgingly moves in, she not only makes new friends, she falls in love. Then the exhaustion, vomiting, and confusion start. Her children and grandchildren worry it’s cancer, dementia, a stroke. But a raft of tests later, the news is even more shocking: she’s pregnant.

Once word gets out, everyone wants a piece of her: the press and the paparazzi, activists and medical researchers, all descending on Vista View as Pepper tries to determine her next move. Soon Pepper has some hard decisions to make—and some she’s not allowed to make. Enormous Wings is an urgent novel about female agency and bodily autonomy, morality and mortality. It’s about what happens when you don’t get to choose. It’s about motherhood and family, sex and love and friendship, and how those bedrocks—even so late in the day—can still change, and then change everything.

Academy Award winning actress Viola Davis and the world’s #1 bestselling author James Patterson’s Judge Stone “delivers first-class courtroom drama, small-town excitement, and strong characters all wrapped in a moral dilemma. Tense, readable, and relevant.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

The most respected citizen in Union Springs, Alabama (population 3,314), is Judge Mary Stone. She holds two responsibilities sacred: running her family farm and presiding over her courtroom. It’s there she draws the most controversial case in the history of the South. Criminally, it’s open-and-shut. Ethically, there is no middle ground. Essentially, it’s a choice between life and death. No judge can satisfy everyone. It would be dangerous to try. But Judge Stone is willing to fight to bring justice to the people and place she loves.

France, début des années 1970, trois femmes, trois vies et trois grossesses subies. Chacune d’entre elles décide alors de se rendre en Angleterre dans un bus affrété par le Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception. Florence Cestac et Tonino Benacquista signent une oeuvre rare, d’une grande humanité, sensible et souvent drôle sur un sujet particulièrement délicat, l’avortement.

À travers de magnifi ques portraits de femmes, “Des salopes et des anges” ne juge pas, mais parvient tout en finesse à remettre en question les certitudes. Indispensable.

Sabrina est une jeune italienne de 25 ans au caractère bien trempé, elle vit chez ses parents dans une petite ville de province, mais passe le plus clair de son temps chez son petit ami, Stefano. Mal à l’aise dans son corps et dans sa vie, elle exprime parfois violemment son mal-être et se heurte à sa famille et à son entourage. Confrontée comme tous les italiens de sa génération à une terrible crise économique, elle affronte également une crise existentielle. Au seuil de l’indépendance et du monde adulte, elle ne se sent pas en mesure de faire face à ces changements.

Un début décembre, une grossesse imprévue vient bouleverser la vie déjà passablement mouvementée de Sabrina. Elle décide d’avorter mais le rendez-vous à la clinique est fixé au mois de janvier, du fait des fêtes de fin d’année… Près de trente jours pendant lesquels Sabrina est soumise à des pulsions contradictoires, à l’angoisse et à la colère, se fait licencier et se sépare de son compagnon… Perturbée par tous ces événements, elle devra aussi composer avec les répercussions psychologiques de l’avortement avant de retrouver un équilibre. Lucia Biagi aborde le thème de l’avortement à travers un récit intimiste et nuancé, au-delà des tabous et des clivages idéologique, et revendique clairement la liberté de choix et l’absolu droit des femmes à décider de tout ce qui concerne leur corps et de leur vie.

Pourquoi ces voyages en train qui l’emmènent toujours ailleurs, avec pour seule compagnie une valise et une carte famille nombreuse ? Pourquoi ce sentiment de n’être jamais à sa place ? Pourquoi ce slogan réclamant le droit à l’avortement semble-t-il lui être adressé ? Pourquoi ce prénom si peu approprié ? Les réponses à ces questions se trouvent au fond d’un carton oublié dans le grenier de la maison familiale.

«Désirée et Alain Frappier nous font revivre les années 1970 à 2014 sous l’angle – excusez du peu, il s’agit de la moitié de la population – de la conquête du droit des femmes à choisir de procréer ou non. Ils le font à leur manière sensible, mêlant l’intime et le politique pour nous rappeler comment c’était «avant», avant la loi Veil, pour montrer combien cette liberté, gagnée dans le combat le plus important du XXe siècle, reste menacée par des nostalgiques d’une société patriarcale.

Die siebzehnjährige Veronica Clarke hätte nie gedacht, dass sie sich mal ein negatives Testergebnis wünschen würde – bis sie eines Tages auf der Schultoilette auf einen Plastikstab mit zwei deutlichen pinkfarbenen Strichen starrt. Und sie trifft eine Entscheidung, von der sie nie glaubte, dass sie sie mal erwägen müsste: für eine Abtreibung. Es gibt nur ein Problem: Die nächste Klinik dafür ist ungefähr tausend Kilometer weit weg. Mit konservativen Eltern, einem nichtsnutzigen Freund und ohne Auto, wendet sich Veronica an die einzige Person, die sie nicht verurteilen wird: Bailey Butler, ein legendäres schwarzes Schaf an der Jefferson High School – und ihre frühere beste Freundin. Was kann schon passieren? Nicht viel, außer drei Tagen mit geklauten Autos, einem verrückt gewordenem Exfreund, Außerirdischen, einer Frettchenentführung und dem Problem einer zerbrochenen Freundschaft. Unter dem sternübersäten Himmel des amerikanischen Südwestens entdecken Veronica und Bailey, dass es manchmal die wichtigste Entscheidung von allen ist, wer deine Freunde sind.

escolha era apenas o começo de uma jornada Veronica Clarke nunca foi reprovada num teste e nunca desejou isso. Até agora… Aluna exemplar, aos 17 anos, ela parece ter uma vida perfeita: um namorado apaixonado, pais que se orgulham dela e uma vaga na universidade dos seus sonhos. Mas, pela primeira vez, um resultado de positivo não lhe parece algo bom. Ao fazer um teste de gravidez, Veronica se descobre grávida e fica em pânico ao ver seus planos de futuro irem por água abaixo. Desesperada, ela decide realizar um aborto. Com medo de enfrentar julgamentos, Veronica encontra uma aliada improvável… a rebelde Bailey Butler, sua ex-melhor amiga, é a única com quem ela pode contar. Para tentar realizar o procedimento, as duas partem em uma viagem de mais de três mil quilômetros, em meio a loucuras, risadas, cumplicidade e discussões que reabrem cicatrizes que precisam arder antes de, talvez, serem curadas. Talvez um teste positivo seja o menor dos problemas. Talvez o percurso seja mais importante. Talvez aprender a rir da vida e não levar tudo a sério seja um caminho. Será?

À 17 ans, Veronica a un avenir prometteur. Élève populaire et brillante, elle vient d’être admise dans une prestigieuse université et sa vie semble toute tracée. Pourtant, le jour où elle découvre qu’elle est enceinte, son monde s’écroule et toutes ses certitudes s’envolent. Elle n’est pas prête.

Parfois, dans la vie, il y a des tests qu’on préfèrerait rater…

Sa seule solution : se rendre dans une clinique à 1 627 kilomètres de chez elle. Désespérée, elle se tourne vers son ex-meilleure amie, Bailey, punkette affranchie, la seule à qui elle peut demander de l’aide.
Commence alors un périple à mille à l’heure sur les routes des États-Unis.

Ces deux filles, que tout oppose, vont devoir affronter le monde et prendre leur destin en main.

Quand l’adolescence révèle son lot de surprises Madeleine et Clémence se serrent les coude et partent en quête de solutions à Londres… Un roman qui soulève des sujets d’actualité : quête d’identité, ivg, amour et amitié

Madeleine, jeune fille cultivée et Clémence à la réputation sulfureuse, sont amies depuis l’école primaire. Elles sont très différentes, mais se sont toujours épaulées. Lorque Clémence tombe enceinte de Théo, son flirt du moment, elle ne sait pas comment affronter la situation et demande conseil à son amie, qui suggère de devenitrjeunes fille au pairs à Londres, car là-bas on est nourri-logé-blanchi, et surtout on peut avorter discrètement. Chacune emporte avec elle son secret : le désir d’avorter pour Clémence et retrouver son père pour Madeleine.

Jeanne retrouve une bande d’amis à chaque vacances dans le village de sa grand-mère. Lucas se joint à eux, Jeanne en tombe amoureuse, éperdument. Lui aussi sans doute. Ce bonheur l’habite, elle en aime le secret, elle aime tout de lui. L’été suivant alors qu’elle revient par surprise, elle comprend que cet amour n’est pas complètement réciproque, pas comme elle le pensait. C’est le trou noir qui l’absorbe. Il lui faudra du temps pour en parler, pour évoquer cet enfant qu’elle attendait et qu’elle n’aura pas… Premier roman, ce monologue puissant restitue avec une incroyable justesse les mots du chagrin, de la perte, de l’amour non partagé.

2 novembre 1999. Luther Dunphy prend la route du Centre des femmes d’une petite ville de l’Ohio et tire sur le Dr Augustus Voorhees, l’un des « médecins avorteurs » de l’hôpital.

De façon remarquable, Joyce Carol Oates dévoile les mécanismes qui ont mené à cet acte meurtrier : Luther Dunphy est à la fois un père rongé par la culpabilité et un mari démuni. Pour ne pas sombrer, il se raccroche à son église, où il fait la rencontre décisive du professeur Wohlman, activiste anti-avortement. Bientôt, il se sent lui aussi investi d’une mission divine, celle de défendre les enfants à naître, peu importe le prix à payer y compris sa future condamnation à mort.

Joyce Carol Oates offre le portrait acéré d’une société ébranlée dans ses valeurs profondes. Sans jamais prendre position, elle rend compte d’une réalité trop complexe pour reposer sur des oppositions binaires. Entre les fœtus avortés, les médecins assassinés ou les « soldats de Dieu » condamnés à la peine capitale, qui sont les véritables martyrs ?
Un roman d’une rare puissance, une question qui déchire avec violence le peuple américain.

Etats-Unis, demain. L’avortement est interdit, l’adoption et la PMA, sur le point de l’être aussi. Non loin de Salem, Oregon, cinq femmes voient leur destin se lier à l’aube de cette nouvelle ère. Il y a Ro, célibataire de quarante-deux ans, qui tente de concevoir un enfant et d’écrire la biographie d’Eivor, une exploratrice islandaise du XIXe siècle ; Susan, lasse de sa vie de mère au foyer et de la banalité des jours qui passent ; la jeune Mattie, née sous X, qui se rêve scientifique. Et Gin. Gin la marginale à laquelle les hommes font un procès en sorcellerie parce qu’elle a voulu aider les femmes. Dans ce roman, âpre et lumineux, Leni Zumas dit l’espoir et la force de chacune pour s’affranchir de sa condition.

Set in 1983, at the height of Canada’s abortion debate, this powerful, nuanced novel for youth follows a young girl as she grapples with an unplanned pregnancy. At fifteen, Leesa is preoccupied with friends, crushes, and schoolwork and looking forward to the freedom of earning her own money and learning to drive. Although she doesn’t think much about politics, she has marched alongside her mother and friend Jenny, protesting the planned opening of an abortion clinic in her city. In her traditional, close-knit community, abortion feels like a black-and-white issue, with little connection to her real life. But after she is raped at a party, Leesa’s life suddenly merges with the headlines of the day. Now she is the one dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, and everything she ever believed is turned upside down. As she struggles to make a decision that could determine her whole future, Leesa comes to realize that she is only one who should have the right to make a choice about her own body. But will opening up to her family and friends mean losing them forever?

Without Authority, is the riveting second book in the Jane Smith Trilogy—a fearless, moving story about defiance, the power of chosen family, and the courage it takes to deliver vital abortion care without permission, without authority, and without apology.

In 1950, Jane Smith has survived Nazis, been jilted by an admiral’s daughter, and nearly lost the young woman she loves like a daughter to an illegal abortion. Now 36, Jane walks a razor’s edge—traveling 4,000 miles to France to do the work she was born for: providing abortion care while staying one step ahead of men’s laws. One mistake. One betrayal. The truth could bring the scaffolding of her life crashing down around her. Closer to home, there is one rejection she cannot risk. Jane’s world is a web of loyalty, betrayal, secrets, broken rules, and lies. How much can she ask her friends to risk for her dream? How far will she go to claim a love she didn’t believe was possible? Can a once crumbling convent in the Parisian countryside become a refuge for women—or will a powerful enemy from the past destroy it all?

A darkly funny, vertiginous novel about the dilemmas of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting, The story follows 32-year-old Sanjana Satyananda, who grapples with feelings of alienation after an abortion and separation from her husband, as her friends embrace motherhood. This leads her to an existential crisis and a search for answers, which involves traveling to India and encountering a doppelgänger. Goddess Complex is a twist-filled psychological thriller and a feminist satire of our age of GirlBosses turned self-care influencers, optimization cults, internet mommy gurus, egg freezing, and much more.

Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties—sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage—with rules. … Raven Leilani’s Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life—her hunger, her anger—in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.

The novel explores the complexities of Edie’s feelings about her abortion, including both the traumatic memories and the potential for a sense of fondness or even a sense of freedom associated with it. Edie’s thoughts and experiences with abortion are woven into the narrative of her life, relationships, and her evolving understanding of herself.

A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three.

Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them. The plot mostly centers on a shared infatuation with one of Rachel’s professors, Fred, and how they work their way into his life. Through this lens O’Donoghue explores many macro situations of the time period, including the Great Recession and the push for abortion rights in Ireland.

A high-school state champion runner turned college dropout, Angela is working as a receptionist at an abortion clinic when a “heartbeat law” criminalizes most abortions statewide. In the ensuing upheaval, her boss is arrested for providing illegal procedures and the clinic is shut down. Angela has never been either an activist or a model employee. But she gets why her boss didn’t follow the rules. She decides to go on a hunger strike in the boarded-up clinic, to protest her boss’s arrest and everything that’s been lost. She’ll draw on her skillset: the masochistic discipline of a runner, a history of self-destructive behavior, and a willingness to sleep on exam room tables (whose hygienic paper she uses as her diary).

Angela’s protest is solitary, enraged, and a little messy, but it mobilizes a group of people around her-an ex who’s a local journalist looking for a good story, the everyday people the clinic once served, and most especially a formidable anti-abortion activist named Janine. Lucid, strange, and deeply metal, State Champ cuts through the political rhetoric to explore the relationship between bodily autonomy and real freedom. Angela’s story is about what abortion access means day-to-day and how much we are-in ways that can transform us-responsible for one another.

Stel je voor: je woont net op kamers en rommelt maar wat aan. Plotseling staat je leven radicaal op de kop: je bent onverwacht en ongewild in verwachting. Maar van wie?
In deze spannende jongerenroman in vrije verzen staat Mel voor een beslissende keuze, die ze helemaal alleen moet maken. Tegen wil en dank moet ze stevig op haar benen staan, zichzelf aankijken en zich afvragen: wie ben ik en wat wíl ik?

Anno 2024 hebben jongeren vaker onveilige seks en neemt het aantal abortussen in Nederland toe. Dat terwijl op veel plekken op aarde de keuzevrijheid van vrouwen juist afneemt. Dit boek laat zien en voelen hoe je eerlijk en open een juiste beslissing neemt, wat die beslissing ook is.

Weaving together the stories of three extraordinary women across five centuries, Emilia Hart’s Weyward is an enthralling novel of female resilience. (Each story involves an abortion experience.)

2019: Under cover of darkness, Kate flees London for ramshackle Weyward Cottage, inherited from a great-aunt she barely remembers. With its tumbling ivy and overgrown garden, the cottage is worlds away from the abusive partner who tormented Kate. But she suspects that her great-aunt had a secret. One that lurks in the bones of the cottage, hidden ever since the witch-hunts of the 17th century.
1619: Altha is awaiting trial for the murder of a local farmer who was stampeded to death by his herd. When Altha was a girl, her mother taught her their magic, a kind not rooted in spell casting but in a deep knowledge of the natural world. But unusual women have always been deemed dangerous, and as the evidence of witchcraft is laid out against Altha, she knows it will take all her powers to maintain her freedom.
1942: As World War II rages, Violet is trapped in her family’s grand, crumbling estate. Straitjacketed by societal convention, she longs for the robust education her brother receives––and for her mother, long deceased, who was rumored to have gone mad before her death. The only traces Violet has of her are a locket bearing the initial W and the word weyward scratched into the baseboard of her bedroom. Weaving together the stories of three extraordinary women across five centuries, Emilia Hart’s Weyward is an astonishing debut, and an enthralling novel of female resilience.

A teenaged refugee chases stardom but finds her purpose in Canada’s abortion-rights movement. Fleeing Chile after the 1973 coup, sixteen-year-old Paulina and her older brother Ernesto settle in Toronto. While Ernesto dreams of a glorious homecoming, Paulina embraces her liberation from the conventional life expected of her back home. Yet despite landing her first big role on a popular children’s cartoon, and her first girlfriend, she cannot escape survivor’s guilt. Haunted by the death of a childhood friend, she joins the underground struggle for reproductive freedom. But when a fellow exile pleads for her help terminating a pregnancy, Paulina’s public and private selves threaten to collide.

Poignant, heart-stopping, and resonant, Waiting for a Star to Fall is a story about love, the things we choose to believe, and how sometimes the path to happily ever after has to start with ourselves.

“Brooke had never been sorry for her abortion. She’d been sorry she ever became pregnant in the first place, of course, for the way it disrupted everything… What if this is me now? she thought as she dragged her body through the hours when she really knew what was happening but still didn’t want to admit it to herself. Tracing the downward spiral—is this how a person loses control of her narrative? Would it be possible to just go to sleep and wake up in a thousand years? She couldn’t envision any other possibility, but thankfully there was one, this procedure that would render her no longer pregnant, her life back on track. Unfathomable mercy, abortion.”

Two Muslim teens in Texas fight for access to abortion while one harbors a painful secret in this funny and heartfelt near-future speculative novel perfect for fans of Unpregnant.

In a not-too-distant America, abortions are prosecuted and the right to choose is no longer an option. But best friends Laylah and Noor want to change the world. After graduating high school, they’ll become an OBGYN and a journalist, but in the meantime, they’re working on an illegal guide to abortion in Texas. In response to the unfair laws, underground networks of clinics have sprung up, but the good fight has gotten even more precarious as it becomes harder to secure safe medication and supplies. Both Laylah and Noor are passionate about getting their guide completed so it can help those in need, but Laylah treats their project with an urgency Noor doesn’t understand—that may have something to do with the strange goings-on between their mosque and a local politician. Fighting for what they believe in may involve even more obstacles than they bargained for, but the two best friends will continue as they always have: together.

Amidst the turmoil of Occupied Paris, 25-year-old teacher Jane Smith is tested as she discovers that sometimes doing the right thing requires breaking rules when her Aunt Mathilde draws her into the dangerous task of smuggling Jewish girls out of France. Adding another layer of danger, the school’s doctor seeks Jane’s help in providing abortions, thrusting her into a clandestine world. Jane embarks on a mission to provide care for those marginalized by society, from migrant workers in California, to women in post-war Japan. When she enlists in the Navy, Jane falls in love with an admiral’s daughter, adding another secret and another rule broken.

In this first book of a trilogy that spans decades and continents, Jane’s journey paints a vivid portrait of essential care given without permission, without authority, and without apology. Without Permission is a poignant tale of love, the power and peril of secrets, and the emotional and spiritual essence of abortion care. Jane’s enduring quest for justice offers a window into the resilience and courage of women who live outside of the laws of men.

An American Marriage centers around Celestial and Roy, a middle-class, young Black couple who are married for a year when Roy is accused of rape and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Celestial discovers she is pregnant shortly after Roy’s incarceration and has an abortion, as she cannot imagine raising a child in those circumstances. We learn this is her second abortion; the first was a result of a relationship with a college professor. An American Marriage unpacks the interconnectedness of race, criminalization, and reproductive decision-making.
(adapted from https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a46992924/abortion-books-reproductive-rights/)

A story of time travel, murder, and the lengths we’ll go to protect the ones we love. 1992: After a confrontation at a riot grrl concert, seventeen-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend’s abusive boyfriend dead in the backseat, agreeing to help her friends hide the body. This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too. 2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change. But rewriting the timeline isn’t as simple as editing one person or event. And just when Tess believes she’s found a way to make an edit that actually sticks, she encounters a group of dangerous travelers bent on stopping her at any cost.

The time-travelers also make edits to history to try to make abortion legal – and have abortions along the way.

This riveting novel traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned–from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren–an enigmatic artist and single mother–who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

In Monica Brashears’ debut novel, a young woman in Tennessee needs to find a way to afford an abortion while navigating poverty, religion — and being haunted by her grandmother’s ghost.

One night, while working at her dead-end gas station job, Magnolia Brown encounters a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton. He offers to turn her luck around with a lucrative “modeling” job at his family’s funeral home―where she will pose as clients’ dead loved ones. She accepts. Despite earning more than she’s ever made, Magnolia finds that her problems are fattening along with her wallet. And when Cotton’s requests become increasingly strange, Magnolia discovers there’s a lot more at stake than just her rent.

Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a searing and compassionate new novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible injustice done to her patients. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend intends to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she hopes to help women shape their destinies, to make their own choices for their lives and bodies. But when her first week on the job takes her along a dusty country road to a worn-down one-room cabin, Civil is shocked to learn that her new patients, Erica and India, are children—just eleven and thirteen years old. Neither of the Williams sisters has even kissed a boy, but they are poor and Black, and for those handling the family’s welfare benefits, that’s reason enough to have the girls on birth control.

As Civil grapples with her role, she takes India, Erica, and their family into her heart. Until one day she arrives at their door to learn the unthinkable has happened, and nothing will ever be the same for any of them. Decades later, with her daughter grown and a long career in her wake, Dr. Civil Townsend is ready to retire, to find her peace, and to leave the past behind. But there are people and stories that refuse to be forgotten. That must not be forgotten. Because history repeats what we don’t remember.

Enero, la primera novela de Sara Gallardo, es una obra breve y poderosa. Nefer, su protagonista adolescente, vive y trabaja con sus padres y su hermana en el puesto de una estancia donde ordeña vacas en el tambo. Los días rutinarios del verano se suceden en aparente calma entre la peonada, pero en Nefer crece una angustia que es como una bola negra que la abruma: ha quedado embarazada luego de una violación. La novela registra magistralmente la imposibilidad de darle voz a esa angustia, y presenta el vínculo con el campo y con los animales como un conocimiento de otro orden capaz de funcionar como refugio ante esa falta de voz. La culpa, el miedo, el odio, y también la esperanza, son las emociones con las que este libro, de una potencia asombrosa, atrapa sin remedio al lector. Novela universal situada en el campo argentino, Enero es una demostración definitiva de la contemporaneidad y la hondura de la literatura de Sara Gallardo, una de las grandes autoras argentinas.

A pioneering, revelatory masterpiece of modern literature that conjures the life of 16-year-old girl living on the Argentine pampas — now in English for the very first time. With echoes of Edith Wharton’s Summer, this radical feminist novel broke the silence around abortion to reshape the way women’s bodies and rights were perceived in 20th-century Argentina.

In the sweltering Argentine pampas, all things bow to Nefer. Reeds nod when she digs her heels into her horse, unripe peaches snap and fall as she gallops past. Sickly-sweet air bends, churns in Nefer’s throat.

A radical feminist text, January was the first Argentine novel to represent rape from the survivor’s perspective and to explore the life-threatening risks pregnancy posed, in a society where abortion was both outlawed and taboo. With a narcotic musicality and voice scorched through with honesty, Gallardo hangs before us an experience that has been lived and ignored a thousand times over. Nefer closes her eyes. We careen to her and we see.

Cleaned Out tells the story of Denise Lesur, a 20-year-old woman suffering the after-effects of a back-alley abortion. Alone in her college dorm room, Denise attempts to understand how her suffocating middle-class upbringing has brought her to such an awful present. Ernaux, one of France’s most important contemporary writers, daringly breaks with formal French literary tradition in this moving novel about abortion, growing up, and coming to terms with one’s childhood.

Dr. Rivien Gilrie had given much of her life to the practice of medicine (including providing abortion) until one day, a violent incursion extinguishes any remaining joy in her calling. To support her young daughter, she takes a short locum in a largely deserted northern Canadian mining town. When a patient casualty is compounded by further death and intrigue, Rivien joins the local Mountie to try to uncover secrets forged by the bond of isolation. But in this remote land, who defines justice?

Roe v. Wade was overturned! The new conservative Lance administration passed a series of “religious laws.”

Lisa, a twenty-year-old college coed, is drugged, raped and tries to get a legal abortion in Canada with the help of her father and the Canadian Underground. However, their plans are thwarted when all are arrested by the United States Coast Guard as they attempt to cross the Detroit River under the cover of darkness. This is just the start of a series of shocking events Lisa could never have predicted.

Will Lisa spend the next twenty years in a Michigan State prison for the attempted murder of her unborn baby?

It’s been a rough year for Alex Collins. In the past twelve months, he’s lost his best friend, become the target of the two biggest bullies at school, and been sentenced to community service. But on June 25, 2013, he gets a call for help from Cassie Ramirez, the prettiest girl in school. At last, he feels like his luck might be changing. Cassie is at the Texas State Capitol to protest Wendy Davis’s historic filibuster of the abortion bill HB2, and she’s rallying everyone she knows to join her. Until today, Alex didn’t know what a filibuster was, and he’d never given a moment’s thought to how he felt about abortion. But at the Capitol, he finds himself in the middle of a tense scene full of pro-life “blueshirts,” pro-choice “orangeshirts,” and blustering politicians playing political games as Wendy Davis tries to run out the clock at midnight.

Alex may have entered the Capitol looking to spend time with Cassie, but the political gets personal when he runs into his ex-friend Shireen in an orange T-shirt and quickly realizes that when it comes to an issue like abortion, neutral isn’t an option. Over the next nineteen hours, Alex will struggle to figure out what side he’s on, knowing that whatever choice he makes will bring him face-to-face with his past mistakes.

« Si vous ou une de vos amies tombe enceinte alors qu’elle ne le souhaite pas, vous devez appeler un médecin et demander Jane. » Jeune étudiante à l’université de Toronto, Nancy Mitchell se raccroche désespérément à ces mots lorsqu’elle découvre sa grossesse en 1980.. Le jour du rendez-vous avec le docteur Evelyn Taylor qui pratique des avortements clandestins, Nancy suit à la lettre les consignes : ne pas donner de nom de famille, venir seule, frapper sept fois à la porte… Elle sait que se rendre au cabinet de Seaton Street pourrait l’envoyer en prison. Pourtant, quelques années plus tard, elle rejoint le réseau Jane, en dépit du danger, pour venir en aide aux jeunes femmes dont elle partage le déchirement. Nancy trouve rapidement sa place dans cette famille de coeur et comprend que chacune a ses propres raisons et secrets pour prendre au quotidien ces risques insensés.. Pour Evelyn Taylor, l’histoire a commencé près de vingt ans auparavant, dans un établissement religieux où les « filles perdues » étaient envoyées donner naissance…. Inspiré de faits réels, un éclairage bouleversant sur un militantisme historique, porté par les destinées de femmes en quête de liberté.

Helen Porter’s first novel, January, February, June or July, tackles the subject of abortion. It won the Young Adult Canadian Book Award from the Canadian Library Association.

Porter introduces us to Heather Novak, a young woman at odds with the world, attempting to cope with the consequences with her first, brief love affair. Porter examines Heather’s relationships with her family, her peers, and a young man who, as did her father years before, leaves her to face alone the painful process of growing up. The book is set in St. John’s Newfoundland, where Porter lived all her life.

Ist es ein Krimi? Nein, ist es nicht. Aber es gibt doch einen Mord? Ja, schon. Was ist es dann? Irene nimmt Dich mit zu ihrer Arbeit. Was sehe ich dort? Die Teamarbeit in einem Museum. In was für einem Museum? Pssst, frag nicht, warte ab. Wie ist es? Manchmal lustig, manchmal traurig und dramatisch. Spannend? Ja, sehr. Lerne ich etwas für mich selbst? Ja, sehr viel. Über Gesundheit, über Frauenrechte, über Medizingeschichte. Und über den Mord? Vielleicht kommst Du beim Lesen selbst drauf. Wenn nicht? Dann wirst Du staunen.

Ein Mord erschüttert ein Museum, über das man nicht spricht ist der Roman der beiden Wissenschaftsautoren Susanne Krejsa MacManus und Christian Fiala. Ein Roman, dessen Handlung sich im Museum für Verhütung und Schwangerschaftsabbruch in Wien abspielt. Verdächtigungen, Einbildungen und alte Schmerzen breiten sich hier aus, gleichzeitig erzählt der Roman die Geschichte der Verhütung, des Schwangerschaftsabbruchs und der Schwangerschaftstests. Eindrücke aus dem real existierenden Museum vermischen sich mit Emotionen und Schicksalen fiktiver Personen, ihrem Zorn und Wut, ihrem Neid und ihrer Verzweiflung, Empörung und Verletztheit. Ein facettenreicher, tiefgründiger und provokanter Text über Verhütung, Schwangerschaftsabbruch und Schwangerschaftstests.

Marian Engel’s mordant, witty first novel (first published in Canada in 1968 as “No Clouds of Glory”) follows the self-sabotage of a Canadian academic mired in an affair with her sister’s husband. Sarah, 30, is the youngest of the four Porlock daughters, an unmarried assistant professor of literature at St. Ardath’s College, Toronto. Wrung out after her exhaustive affair with Sandro, the husband of her pretty sister, Leah, Sarah is contemplating taking off for China (or maybe Africa). She feels abandoned by the recent death of her father; her longtime friend and lover, Joe, has returned to his wife; Sandro has written her a Dear Jane letter.

The story pivots on an abortion. Sarah’s abortion is complicated by social pressure to keep an affair with her sister’s husband a secret. Choosing to name the fetus encapsulates her search for love and identity. She imagines herself as an “almost-mother” to a strong and loving boy with whom she can share the world. Antonio becomes an antidote for her loneliness.

In this stunning debut novel—a tale of self-discovery and feminist awakening—a feisty Nigerian-Ghanaian girl growing up amid the political upheaval of late 1960s postcolonial Ghana begins to question the hypocrisy of her patriarchal society, and the restrictions and unrealistic expectations placed on women.

Young Esi Agyekum is the unofficial “secret keeper” of her family, as tight-lipped about her father’s adultery as she is about her half-sisters’ sex lives. But after she is humiliated and punished for her own sexual exploration, Esi begins to question why women’s secrets and men’s secrets bear different consequences. It is the beginning of a journey of discovery that will lead her to unexpected places.

For almost a decade, Claudia has counseled patients at Mercy Street, a clinic in the heart of the city. The work is consuming, the unending dramas of women in crisis. For its patients, Mercy Street offers more than health care; for many, it is a second chance.

But outside the clinic, the reality is different. Anonymous threats are frequent. A small, determined group of anti-abortion demonstrators appears each morning at its door. As the protests intensify, fear creeps into Claudia’s days, a humming anxiety she manages with frequent visits to Timmy, an affable pot dealer in the midst of his own existential crisis. At Timmy’s, she encounters a random assortment of customers, including Anthony, a lost soul who spends most of his life online, chatting with the mysterious Excelsior11—the screenname of Victor Prine, an anti-abortion crusader who has set his sights on Mercy Street and is ready to risk it all for his beliefs.

A masterful debut novel about three women whose lives are bound together by a long-lost letter, a mother’s love, and a secret network of women fighting for the right to choose—inspired by true stories.

Weaving together the lives of three women, Looking for Jane is an unforgettable debut about the devastating consequences that come from a lack of choice—and the enduring power of a mother’s love.

A remarkable debut about intergenerational female relationships and resistance found in the unlikeliest of places, We, Jane explores the precarity of rural existence and the essential nature of abortion.

Searching for meaning in her Montreal life, Marthe begins an intense friendship with an older woman, also from Newfoundland, who tells her a story about purpose, about a duty to fulfill. It’s back home, and it goes by the name of Jane. Marthe travels back to a small town on the island with the older woman to continue the work of an underground movement in 60s Chicago: abortion services performed by women, always referred to as Jane. She commits to learning how to continue this legacy and protect such essential knowledge.

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself traces the complex consequences of one of the most personal yet public, intimate yet political experiences a family can have: to have a child, and conversely, the decision not to have a child. A first pregnancy is interrupted by test results at once catastrophic and uncertain. A second pregnancy ends in a fraught birth, a beloved child, the purgatory of further tests—and questions that reverberate down the years. When does sorrow turn to shame? When does love become labor? When does chance become choice? When does a diagnosis become destiny? And when does fact become fiction? This spare, graceful narrative chronicles the flux of parenthood, marriage, and the day-to-day practice of loving someone. As challenging as it is vulnerable, as furious as it is tender, as touching as it is darkly comic, Peter Ho Davies’s new novel is an unprecedented depiction of fatherhood.

These stories, rooted in Judith Arcana’s experience as a Jane in Chicago’s pre-Roe v. Wade underground abortion service, were written as the United States has moved relentlessly into constraining motherhood and denying reproductive justice. By necessity, these stories reach from the past into the future, offering history and hope.

‘There came the splash of water and the rub of heels as Mrs Barber stepped into the tub. After that there was a silence, broken only by the occasional echoey plink of drips from the tap… ‘Frances had been picturing her lodgers in purely mercenary terms – as something like two great waddling shillings. But this, she thought, was what it really meant to have paying guests: this odd, unintimate proximity, this rather peeled-back moment, where the only thing between herself and a naked Mrs Barber was a few feet of kitchen and a thin scullery door. An image sprang into her head: that round flesh, crimsoning in the heat.’ It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. For with the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the ‘clerk class’, the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. And as passions mount and frustration gathers, no one can foresee just how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be. This is vintage Sarah Waters: beautifully described with excruciating tension, real tenderness, believable characters, and surprises. It is above all a wonderful, compelling story.

Seventeen-year-old Veronica Clarke never thought she’d want to fail a test–that is, until she finds herself staring at a piece of plastic with two solid pink lines. With a promising college-bound future now disappearing before her eyes, Veronica considers a decision she never imagined she’d have to make: an abortion. There’s just one catch–the closest place to get one is over nine hundred miles away. With conservative parents, a . . . let’s say less-than-optimal boyfriend, and no car, Veronica turns to the only person she believes won’t judge her: Bailey Butler, a legendary misfit at Jefferson High–and Veronica’s ex-best friend. The plan is straightforward: a fourteen-hour drive to the clinic, three hours for the appointment, and a fourteen-hour drive home. What could go wrong? Not much, apart from three days of stolen cars, shot guns, crazed ex-boyfriends, aliens, ferret napping, and the pain and betrayal of a broken friendship that can’t be outrun. Under the starlit skies of the American Southwest, Veronica and Bailey discover that sometimes the most important choice is who your friends are.

It’s 1992, and there’s a rumor spreading in Baton Rouge… When it comes to being social, Athena Graves is far more comfortable creating a mixtape playlist than she is talking to cute boys–or anyone, for that matter. Plus her staunchly feminist views and love of punk rock aren’t exactly mainstream at St. Ann’s, her conservative Catholic high school. Then a malicious rumor starts spreading through the halls…a rumor that her popular, pretty, pro-life sister had an abortion over the summer. A rumor that has the power to not only hurt Helen, but possibly see her expelled. Despite their wildly contrasting views, Athena, Helen and their friends must find a way to convince the student body and the administration that it doesn’t matter what Helen did or didn’t do…even if their riot grrrl protests result in the expulsion of their entire rebel girl gang.

Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall meet in their first month at prestigious Edwards University. Phoebe is a glamorous girl who doesn’t tell anyone she blames herself for her mother’s recent death. Will is a misfit scholarship boy who transfers to Edwards from Bible college, waiting tables to get by. What he knows for sure is that he loves Phoebe.

Grieving and guilt-ridden, Phoebe is drawn into a secretive cult founded by a charismatic former student with an enigmatic past. When the group commits a violent act in the name of faith, Will finds himself struggling to confront a new version of the fanaticism he’s worked so hard to escape. Haunting and intense, The Incendiaries is a fractured love story that explores what can befall those who lose what they love most.

It’s 1959 in the little city of Newburgh, New York, and all 11-year-old Louisa (“Louey”) Levy wants to do is listen to rock ‘n roll and play baseball with her big brother and their pals. It’s an idyllic, small-town life — until that life starts to crumble around her. In the space of just a few months, Louey’s hero Buddy Holly is killed in a plane crash; her mother dies; and her father, Newburgh’s city manager, suffers a stroke as he prepares for the city’s 250th anniversary celebration. When she finds her best friend’s teenage sister bleeding in an alley, Louey must quickly — and painfully — learn the meaning of loyalty and courage in the midst of loss. In the tradition of “Dirty Dancing” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” this touching novel is filled with endearing, eccentric characters, a great deal of humor, and an exploration of Jewish and American values — all of which Louey needs to pull her through.

Why on earth should the unwilling have the unwanted? The unwilling are the biologically trapped mothers-to-be in what is a legally, and in many cases, ethically, sacrosant situation and this is the inflammable issue of Mrs. Wertenbaker’s novel. She pursues it, as one might expect, intimately, fervently, preempting one’s sympathies from start to finish. Daly Hill has a minimal practice of pregnant women in a small town in North Carolina; they’re his morning patients. But his afternoon women come from all over–they need an abortion, and he’s been taking care of them ever since the death of his daughter (at an abortionist’s dirty hands) about ten years before–a death he’s been expiating ever since. He’s a good man. Now with three women in his waiting room (Nora Fanning, 49, widowed; Dane Castleready, a psychotic gal; Mary Dee Lawn who has four babies at home) he’s about to face an inspection of his cellar clinic.

A modern parable, which deals with the complex ethical dilemmas revolving around an abortion clinic.

This is not a simple story. At the heart is Hannah, who confronts bitter knowledge of the God who delivered her parents from Auschwitz to brutal death in America. It is about men and women who fall in love, become obsessed with each other’s needs, and in doing so commit unwitting cruelties, all the while clinging to their visions of renewal. To the question society so frantically asks: What shall we do about our unwanted offspring?” Norma Rosen’s novel replies with an even more urgent one: “What shall we do about ourselves?”

Returning home to the Idaho potato farm she fled twenty-five years earlier, Japanese-American Yumi struggles with her father’s terminal illness, her mother’s Alzheimer’s, her former best friend, and a former lover who once offended the town. A backstreet abortion ends a relationship and drives a wedge between Yumi and her best friend, Cassie Quinn. Cassie resents Yumi for terminating the pregnancy.

From the American Book Award-winning author of “The Mixquiahuala Letters” comes the story of a remarkable woman and her four daughters living in New Mexico–a novel shaped by influences as diverse as Mexican mythology, Catholicism, and today’s headlines.

Caridad is the third and most beautiful of Sofi’s daughters. She is vibrant, sensual, and sexually active. She loved one man and when he broke her heart by cheating on her after their wedding, Caridad turned her back on love. For several years, she gets involved with dangerous men, heavy drinking, and lots of sex. She has three abortions, all performed by her sister, La Loca, and is severely beaten by a supernatural beast.

Phoebe is a “misconceiver”, an illegal and dangerous occupation after the repeal of the abortion laws in 2011. She restores to women some control over their bodies, yet has growing qualms about her vocation. When her secret identity is betrayed, the choices confronting her shock her to the core.

Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices. Surfacing is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose. Here is a rich mine of ideas from an extraordinary writer about contemporary life and nature, families and marriage, and about women fragmented…and becoming whole.

Voted Book of the Year (1993) by the French literary magazine Lire, this novel tells the story of a Jewish woman’s struggle to come to terms with the abortion she was forced to have during the French Occupation. An honest and compelling account which explores loss, guilt, regret and isolation coupled with anger and resentment in the face of injustice and persecution.

Fourteen-year-old Mary McNamara does not know the words for what her father did to her down by the river, but she knows nothing will ever be the same again. In her small hometown in the West of Ireland, where poverty and ignorance make people hard, bitter, and unforgiving, Mary will find scant justice or mercy when her private tragedy is dragged into the public arena. “A heady blend of insight, intellect, and poetry”.–“The New York Times Book Review”.

Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid’s novel is the deeply charged story of a woman’s life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own.
Kincaid takes us from Xuela’s childhood in a home where she can hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack LaBatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela’s is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is “the black room of the world” that is Xuela’s barrenness and motherlessness.

The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one woman’s inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical poetry.

A bold new novel about the redemptive power of love. Hailed by Jamie James in The Atlantic Monthly as “one of the most original voices on the literary scene,” Lois-Ann Yamanaka is back with a novel about family and forgiveness. Set in Hawaii and Las Vegas, Father of the Four Passages tells the story of Sonia Kurisu, a street-wise young mother, who struggles to raise her child, Sonny Boy, as she seeks to come to terms with the three children she aborted. In sequences alternating between the past and the present, we learn of Sonia’s childhood-her abandonment by her father and her mother; her contentious relationship with her sister, Celeste; her string of bad lovers; her problems with drugs and alcohol-and of her wish to reconcile with her father and make something of her life by being a good parent to her son, who has begun to show signs of developmental problems. A haunting novel about fathers, forgiveness, spirituality, and solace, Father of the Four Passages is Yamanaka’s most ambitious work to date.

This story is about Nirmala the Mud Blossom, who had the misfortune of being born female in Mumbai. Rejected and thrown into the dustbin when she was just two days old, the child was rescued and returned to her family by the NGOs. Nirmala is ill-treated by her mother and subject to violence at her hands. She is allowed to continue her studies only because she can coach her younger brothers, as her parents are illiterate. On one occasion her mother brutally beats her when she is caught reading David Copperfield instead of doing the household chores; on another, she is struck for voicing her dreams of becoming a doctor. Loving school and the access it gives her to books she relishes, Nirmala accepts each beating with forbearance. What will happen to this little mud blossom? Will she fight back or succumb? How can she rid herself of harassment and rise above the stigma she endures? Nirmala: The Mud Blossom graphically depicts the travails, discrimination, and abuse faced by female children in India from the cradle to the grave.

Mellie has always abided by the rules of her ultra-conservative family. But when she is raped by someone she trusts, she has no one to turn to. So she keeps silent. And when she discovers she is pregnant, she is faced with a life-altering choice. Liese is a young champion for women’s rights, and when she notices Mellie acting strangely, she gets caught up in a whirlwind trying to save her…while trying to keep her own secret. One that might be the key to helping Mellie. Told through their journal entries, this powerful, emotional novel chronicles the fight for Mellie’s right to choose and the unbreakable bond formed by the girls on their journey.

In a beautifully written tale woven together with magic and mystery, flowers and food, Bay Singer finally discovers the secrets her mother has been hiding.

“Each chapter begins with a short excerpt on a flower or herb and the powers it holds. Several are noted as abortifacients and there is an underlying theme of abortions (herbal and medical) throughout the novel. ‘There were so many for a while there, and then, when the law changed, there were less and less until she was no longer needed. There were stragglers, of course; those who didn’t want a doctor.’ ” — Rhiannon Johnson

In this sequel to Middenrammers, the fight for women’s rights continues in Sweport UK. Woodie and Brian have been forced to leave the hospital service. She is now a district nurse, visiting patients at home, and he has become a G.P. Together with his senior partner, Dr. Van, and helped by Woodie’s mother, Barbara, they have devised a simple method of providing women with access to contraceptive advice and safe abortions in a town where these are proscribed. But they are faced with hospital administrators who are doing everything in their power to prevent the staff from giving contraceptive advice or arranging abortions. As a doctor and a midwife, the pair comes face-to-face with these destructive policies on a daily basis. In simply trying to do what is right for the patients and the town, they find themselves in the midst of a different kind of revolution.

The lives of ordinary people become intertwined when a gunman takes hostages at a women’s clinic in the #1 New York Times bestselling author’s latest.

A review in USA Today: “Jodi Picoult’s new novel: A deadly shooting at a Mississippi abortion clinic”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2018/10/01/jodi-picoult-takes-abortion-clinic-shooting-new-novel-spark-light-book-review/1456566002/

De regels van het ciderhuis speelt in het landelijke Maine, in de eerste helft van twintigste eeuw. Het vertelt het verhaal van Homer Wells, een wees die is opgevoed door Wilbur Larch, de dokter van het weeshuis. Dokter Larch leert Homer alles over geneeskunde. Maar hoewel zijn capaciteit voor vriendelijkheid bijna die van een heilige is, is Homers ‘mentor’ ook een ether-verslaafde. Hij en Homer raken in een typisch vader-zoonconflict, dat nog wordt versterkt door hun verschil van mening over abortus. Het gevolg is dat Homer het weeshuis verlaat, en daarmee de enige familie die hij ooit heeft gekend. Homers nieuwe leven brengt allerlei spannende dingen met zich mee, vooral wanneer hij voor het eerste van zijn leven verliefd wordt. Maar als hij voor een allesbepalende keuze komt te staan, beseft hij dat hij niet kan ontkomen aan zijn verleden. ‘De regels van het ciderhuis’ gaat over keuzes die we maken en de regels die er zijn om gebroken te worden.

‘Die Mütter’, so nennen sich die alten Frauen in der kleinen kalifornischen Gemeinde Oceanside. Sie sind Zeugen des Skandals, mit dem dieser Roman beginnt. Ein Skandal ist es, wenigstens aus ihrer Perspektive: Dass Nadia Turner, deren Mutter sich das Leben genommen hat, mit Luke, dem Sohn des Pastors … Dass Nadia Turner ein Baby bekommt … Oder vielmehr beschließt, es nicht zu bekommen. Und das ist erst der Anfang der Geschichte, der Anfang einer Geschichte voller Zuneigung und Komplikationen.

Nadia kehrt der Kleinstadtenge bald den Rücken, sie geht aufs College, bereist die Welt. Aubrey, ihre beste Freundin, bleibt und stellt sich auf ihre Weise gegen den Chor der alten Frauen, deren Stimmen über die Jahre merklich auseinandergehen. Es dauert nicht lange und sie feiern ein neues Paar in Oceanside: Aubrey und Luke Sheppard. Und das beschäftigt die heimgekehrte Nadia mehr, als sie vor der besten Freundin zugeben kann.

Anthony, jeune homme avide d’ambition, décide de prendre son futur en main en quittant sa Bourgogne natale pour Nice. Au fur et à mesure de ses péripéties, il relèvera les différences culturelles et linguistiques entre sa campagne, qu’il affectionne tant, et la ville, qui représente la société moderne.

Il se liera d’amitié avec trois personnages : Christophe, infirmier, qui rencontre une patiente condamnée, laquelle demande à ce qu’on mette fin à son existence ; Victoire, qui suite à une rupture sentimentale porte le lourd choix de l’avenir de son enfant à travers l’avortement ; et enfin Juliette, célibataire désespérée, qui force le hasard en cherchant l’amour à l’aide des applications mobiles.

Une problématique intervient alors : jusqu’à quel point peut-on être maître de son destin ?

Katherine, une enseignante et mère d’un enfant, doit prendre la décision la plus difficile de toute son existence. Au terme d’un concours de circonstances en escalade et de tests médicaux éprouvants, elle avorte d’un bébé de 23 semaines, atteint d’une grave maladie héréditaire propre au Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, la tyrosinémie. Mais après coup, les remords et le chagrin l’amènent lentement au bord de l’abîme. Angoisse et culpabilité deviennent partie prenante de son quotidien, alors que son conjoint, un agent de la paix, vit également ce deuil à la dure, à sa manière. Pourront-ils tous les deux entreprendre et réussir un long processus de rétablissement, semblable à la guérison d’un choc post-traumatique?

Rédigé dans un style vif et empreint de poésie, ce récit touchant se veut une réflexion intime concernant le droit à l’existence, la résilience, la génétique médicale et le fait d’être mère à notre époque post-moderne.

Un jour, Denis, une petite gloire du milieu du rock, trouve un étrange message sur la boîte vocale de son téléphone : Tatiana, une fille avec qui “ça s’était mal terminé” trois ans plus tôt, lui révèle qu’elle a été enceinte de lui, qu’elle a avorté sans lui dire, et qu’il doit maintenant payer. La somme est dérisoire, mais cette brutale reconnaissance de dette bouleverse Denis, anti-héros qui, jusque-là, vivait en bons termes avec ses compromis. Michka Assayas brosse le portrait d’une génération immature, celle des quadragénaires qui n’ont jamais voulu grandir et qui laissent en héritage, sinon des mythes ou des légendes urbaines, le culte de l’argent et de la célébrité, et le mépris pour ceux qui n’ont ni l’un ni l’autre.

Voilà Lucas. Lucas et ses yeux de chien battu. Lucas et ses mains moites, ses baisers trop mouillés. Lucas, qui n’a toujours pas compris qu’entre nous c’est terminé. Dégage, Lucas. Disparais ! Fous-moi la paix ! D’habitude, en soirée, je danse, je m’éclate. Ça me permet d’oublier les semaines en solitaire, le silence étouffant de cet appartement trop grand. Là, c’est le contraire. Je me sens étrangère. Pas intégrée. Désintégrée.

« Je suis enceinte. » C’est réel, puisque je l’ai dit. Je n’ai plus le choix, je ne peux plus faire comme si j’en m’en foutais.

Jeanne commence une nouvelle vie à la campagne avec Jeff et prépare sa première expo photo. Adeline, toute dévouée à Célestin, 18 mois, a tendance à s’oublier un peu. Sa petite sœur, Lucie, découvre qu’elle est enceinte et ne se sent pas prête à être mère à 20 ans. Entre manque d’information, culpabilisation et obstacles à surmonter, Lucie réalise que, 37 ans après la loi Veil, avorter n’est pas encore simple. Incomprise par sa sœur, mais soutenue par Harry, son amoureux, et bien sûr par Jeanne, Lucie commence alors un drôle de parcours du combattant.

Dans la France occupée, une jeune femme d’origine juive, mariée et déjà mère d’un enfant, apprend qu’elle est enceinte… Entre fantastique et réalisme, une incursion dans le « continent noir » qu’était, pour Freud, l’inconscient féminin.

« Paris, 1943. En pleine guerre, Hannah apprend qu’elle est enceinte. Ce deuxième enfant, elle le désire de toute son âme. Mais le contexte est trop précaire et Robert, engagé dans la Résistance, la convainc de renoncer à cette grossesse. Hannah se rend à ses raisons. Lorsqu’elle découvre que c’était une petite fille, tout bascule. Commence alors pour elle une double vie : en marge de sa vie réelle, une vie secrète, qu’elle consigne dans son journal et ne peut partager avec personne. »

Candy et Pamela sont les meilleures amies du monde. Les meilleures ennemies aussi. Un jour pourtant, leur amitié exclusive est fragilisée par l’arrivée des garçons. C’est l’heure des premiers baisers, des premières aventures amoureuses et des premières relations sexuelles pour les jeunes filles. Et puis tout va très vite. Candy devra se rendre à l’évidence : elle se retrouve enceinte. Elle a 15 ans. Il faut prendre une décision. Candy est confrontée à son présent – les études, la famille – et son avenir.

Comment c’est possible ? Quel enchaînement de circonstances improbables il a fallu pour me conduire d’une vie adolescente faite de couloirs du lycée, de parties de tennis, de devoirs à plat ventre sur la moquette, de textos, de discussions sur Facebook, de rouge à lèvres, mascara, baskets à talons compensés, fraises Tagada, disputes avec Papa, engueulades avec Maman, baisers, garçons, copines, amour… Par quel chemin tortueux ai-je bien pu arriver ici ? Nola est tombée enceinte. Alors qu’elle est dans le bureau du docteur, tout bascule. Aura-t-elle encore la possibilité de décider ?

Lorsqu’elle se découvre enceinte, Magda décide de traverser le Maroc pour rejoindre l’homme qu’elle aime, et choisir avec lui quelle sera leur vie future. À ses pas s’attachent ceux d’une inconnue, une toute jeune fille apparemment perdue, qu’elle a recueillie une première fois, et qu’elle retrouve, contre toute attente, sur la route. De l’énigmatique présence de cette jeune fille sourd une angoisse de plus en plus palpable, et de plus en plus étouffante pour Magda. Elle-même aux prises avec les fantômes d’une existence dont elle ne parvient plus à saisir les rênes, elle ne comprend pas ce que lui veut cette fille, qui la suit comme une ombre. De leur confrontation naîtront les réponses aux questions que se pose Magda.

Camille (14 ans) et Anastasia (15 ans) vivent avec leur mère dans leur ancienne maison de campagne, perdue au bout d’une presqu’île. Anastasia est belle, brillante, elle a plein d’amis ; Camille se fiche de la mode, de l’école, elle se braque facilement, la seule chose qu’elle aime : dessiner. Anastasia, après une aventure d’un soir, se retrouve enceinte. Elle n’arrive pas à se l’avouer, tarde à l’annoncer, elle ne pourra pas avorter en France. La mère ne veut pas du tout entendre parler de « ça », geint et pleurniche. La grand-mère prendra les choses en main et réconfortera sa petite-fille. Le père exclu jusqu’à présent fera preuve de son sens des responsabilités et retrouvera ainsi ses filles. Anastasia part en Espagne avec sa soeur, sa tante et sa grand-mère. Le récit de Camille n’est pas du tout dramatique, spectatrice attentive du chaos familial, elle observe l’agitation avec lucidité et affection. Ce roman met surtout en avant les relations entre tous les membres de cette famille, il dresse un portrait sévère d’une mère-enfant égoïste et lâche.

(publié en français en avril 2017)
“Son visage était comme un labyrinthe parfait qui me détournait d’un très inquiétant quelque chose.” Un homme vit cloîtré dans une bibliothèque insolite qui accueille jour et nuit des manuscrits refusés par les éditeurs. On y trouve des mémoires de grand-mère ou bien des livres sur la culture des fleurs à la lueur des bougies dans une chambre d’hôtel. Un jour, une jeune femme sublime vient déposer son livre. Il parle de son corps, cette chose terrible qui l’encombre tant. Entre le bibliothécaire maladroit et cette merveilleuse créature une intense histoire d’amour va naître.

When a young woman dies mysteriously on an operating table and her physician is accused of murder, a colleague’s investigation takes him from a deadly sex and drug underworld to the heights of Boston society as he searches for the truth. A first novel.

Vengeance criminelle ? Meurtre crapuleux ou erreur médicale impardonnable ? Qui a intérêt à ce que le cadavre de la jeune Karen, lamentablement échoué dans une rue de Boston, emporte à tout jamais avec lui ses secrets ? Comment expliquer cette fin sordide pour la fille d’un des plus grands médecins de la ville, fût-elle marginale, nymphomane et droguée ? Est-elle morte, comme on le croit, des suites d’un avortement illégal ? La police a-t-elle raison de soupçonner le médecin asiatique qui aurait pratiqué l’intervention ?

L’autopsie livre des révélations de plus en plus surprenantes. L’enquête chirurgicale tourne au suspense le plus pur… Là où enquêteurs et policiers s’avouent très vite impuissants, un scientifique- seul face à tous réussira peut-être à élucider le mystère insondable d’une vie qui n’est plus.

Sophie Girard, travailleuse sociale, propose ici un roman d’une grande sensibilité, dans lequel elle aborde avec beaucoup de finesse certains des enjeux les plus préoccupants de l’adolescence : les relations amoureuses, la grossesse et l’avortement.

Je fondais tant d’espérances dans l’année de mes quinze ans… Je m’imaginais enfin rencontrer le grand amour, ressentir les petits papillons et tout le tralala. Pourtant, jamais je n’aurais pu imaginer l’enchaînement d’événements qui m’a amenée à faire le vide… en moi. Christophe, le « roi de la drague », qui m’a envoûtée d’un simple regard, si profond que j’ai été engloutie. Ma mère, qui ne me comprenait pas, qui me surprotégeait, surveillait mes moindres gestes. Ce que j’ai pu la détester ! Mes amies, mes vraies complices avec qui je partage tout. La liberté, la sensation d’enfin vivre MA vie, à MA façon, même si ça ne faisait qu’enrager encore plus ma mère… Et puis, la trahison, la peine, l’incompréhension. J’aurais voulu hurler ma douleur à la terre entière. Mais voilà que la vie en a décidé autrement : je devais mettre ma peine de côté et faire un choix… Un choix si important qu’il déterminerait chaque minute de mon existence… et de la sienne.

Les aventures d’une sage-femme à la fin du 19e siècle. Ariège, 1882. Angélina et son mari Luigi reviennent à Saint-Lizier après un pèlerinage à Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle. La jeune femme, enceinte de quatre mois, a hâte de retrouver son dispensaire et d’exercer à nouveau son métier de sage-femme.Mais Léonore, l’épouse de Guilhem Lesage, son premier amour et le père de son fils Henri, lui voue une haine aveugle. Découvrant par hasard qu’Angélina a pratiqué un avortement sur sa servante Rosette, elle dénonce les deux jeunes femmes à un juge dont elle est la maîtresse. Angélina et Rosette sont arrêtées et emprisonnées sous la menace de la pire des sanctions : l’envoi au bagne…

Ils sont deux à se partager la clientèle du cabinet. Jean Baudoin, le fondateur, la cinquantaine à la fois fringante et fatiguée. Il ne garde jamais les gens plus de dix minutes, distribue les médocs comme les regards méprisants. Les malades l’énervent de plus en plus. Et Vianney Chasseloup, un débutant, avec des yeux d’âne, un prénom de saint, une triste figure de chevalier, les cheveux en pagaille et le veston froissé. C’est lui qui soigne tous ceux dont Baudoin ne veut plus : les vieux, les gâteux, les paumés, les cas désespérés. Mais voilà qu’un jour, parmi les patients du docteur Chasseloup, se glisse une toute jeune fille aux yeux bleus, presque violets. Violaine. Aussi jolie que son prénom peut le laisser espérer. Elle a tout pour être heureuse. C’est la fille du docteur Baudoin. Alors, qu’est-ce qu’elle fait là ?

Annie Ernaux raconte l’histoire de Denise, une jeune étudiante qui vient d’avoir recours à un avortement clandestin. Alors qu’elle souffre sur son lit, elle revient sur son enfance, son rapport à la sexualité et les événements qui l’ont menée jusque là.

Two families. Two faces of America. An act of violence with far-reaching consequences. Gus Voorhees is a pioneer in the advancement of women’s reproductive rights and a controversial abortion provider in the American Midwest. One morning as he arrives at his clinic, he is ambushed by a hardline Christian, Luther Dunphy, and shot dead. The killing leaves in its wake two fatherless families: the Voorheeses, who are affluent, highly educated, secular and pro-choice, and the Dunphys, their opposite on all counts. When the daughters of the two families, Naomi Voorhees and Dawn Dunphy, glimpse each other at the trial of Luther Dunphy, their initial response is mutual hatred. But their lives are tangled together forever by what has happened, and throughout the years to come and the events that follow, neither can quite forget the other.

A heart-rending reckoning with some of the most incendiary issues that divide us in our troubled times – religious extremism; abortion; gun violence; capital punishment – this is a novel Joyce Carol Oates was born to write. To read it is to encounter the full spectrum of humanity – its ugliness, misery, beauty and hope

Inhalt: Der sechste Roman von John Irving spielt überwiegend in den Dreißiger- und Vierzigerjahren des letzten Jahrhunderts und erzählt die Geschichte des Waisenjungen Homer Wells, der in der Obhut des äthersüchtigen Doktor Wilbur Larch, des Leiters des abgelegenen Saint Cloud’s Waisenhauses im US-Bundesstaat Maine, aufwächst. Dr. Larch, seines Zeichens Gynäkologe und erfahrener Geburtshelfer, betätigt sich nicht nur als Erzieher und medizinischer Betreuer der Waisen von Saint Cloud’s, sondern führt entgegen der damals herrschenden Gesetzeslage auch Abtreibungen durch. Er handelt dabei in der festen Überzeugung, dass Frauen die Wahl haben sollten, ein Kind auszutragen oder die Schwangerschaft abzubrechen, sofern sie adäquat informiert sind. Das Buch skizziert den Weg des Dr. Larch vom Medizinstudenten, der im Zuge der Behandlung einer auf sexuelle Kontakte mit einer Prostituierten zurückzuführenden Geschlechtskrankheit der Äthersucht verfällt, zum erfahrenen Arzt, der sich angesichts des Todes der Prostituierten und ihrer Tochter bei unsachgemäß ausgeführten Abtreibungen entschließt, selbst Abtreibungen durchzuführen, und sich damit fortan sowohl Gottes Werk (der Frucht der Empfängnis) als auch dem Beitrag des Teufels (der ungewollten Schwangerschaft) widmet.

Hailed as a masterpiece of realistic fiction and as the most evocative portrayal of the opulent desolation of the American suburbs since it’s publication in 1961, Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple who have lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.

From Bustle.com: Abortion is like a ghost that meanders through Frank and April are an all-American couple, but their marriage began as the result of an unplanned pregnancy. Now, caught in a last-ditch effort to save her relationship, another pregnancy puts April in danger.

A reclusive young man works in a San Francisco library for unpublishable books. Life’s losers, an astonishing number of whom seem to be writers, can bring their manuscripts to the library, where they will be welcomed, registered and shelved. They will not be read, but they will be cherished. In comes Vida, with her manuscript. Her book is about her gorgeous body in which she feels uncomfortable. The librarian makes her feel comfortable, and together they live in the back of the library until a trip to Tijuana changes them in ways neither of them had ever expected.

The first time I encountered mostly guilt-free abortion in fiction – paired with the repressive attitude in Ireland – was in Maeve Binchy’s debut novel, Light a Penny Candle, from 1982. Binchy never shied away from the issues affecting the lives of Irish women, despite being often dismissed as “merely” a women’s fiction writer. She touches on abortion in several of her short stories, but Light a Penny Candle (which takes place in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s) is her most explicit engagement with the topic. (from Claire Hennessy)

To escape the chaos of London during World War II, young Elizabeth White is sent to live a safer life in the small Irish town of Kilgarret. It is there, in the crowded, chaotic O’Connor household, that she meet Aisling—a girl who soon becomes her very best friend, sharing her pet kitten and secretly teaching her the intricacies of Catholicism. Aisling’s boldness brings Elizabeth out of her proper shell; later, her support carries Elizabeth through the painful end of her parents’ chilly marriage. In return, Elizabeth’s friendship helps Aisling endure her own unsatisfying marriage to a raging alcoholic. Through the years, they come to believe they can overcome any conflict, conquer any hardship—as long as they have each other. Now they’re about to find out if they’re right…

A college-bound high school senior seeks advice and information in order to decide whether she should terminate her pregnancy.
(From Claire Hennessy)AM Stephenson’s Unbirthday stands in stark contrast to other teen-pregnancy texts of the time for portraying an abortion that is a good thing for (and doesn’t lead to the death of!) the potential mother.

The novel follows Wilbur Larch, obstetrician and orphanage director, over the course of his very long life, with the main emphasis on the forty-some years he shares with his favorite and finally unadoptable orphan Homer Wells from the 1920’s to the 1950’s. Homer evolves into Larch’s apprentice, spending years with Gray’s Anatomy and real-life midwifery until there is little difference in training between Dr. and pupil. The father/son theme runs wide in this novel but has its genesis in Larch’s childlessness among many hundreds of orphans and Homer’s fatherlessness with Larch as father figure extraordinaire. The orphanage at St. Cloud’s has a deep secret that gives Larch his impetus to train a successor: it is the only place in a wide swath of rural Maine that a woman can receive a safe and professional abortion. Among the many births that keep the orphanage full and Larch and Homer busy in delivery, there is the other work of rescue that Larch pursues and Homer eventually rejects. The polemical possibilities of the pro-life and pro-choice debate are not missed in the long case of Larch and Homer, but it’s important to see this debate in the context of the time, and to see how Irving widens his lens on so much else in the moral universe.

There is a Bomb in Gilead is the story of individuals and families in one small theatre of the uncivil war that Pro-Life religious fundamentalist militants have waged in the United States on women seeking safe and legal elective abortions, and against those who provide these services. It is set in the fictional town of Gilead just before Easter in the mid-1980’s. Against the background of President Reagan’s support for anti-abortion activities is set the tales of a beautiful young unwed mother of two, Mary Ann Mack, who is pregnant for the third time; of the God-intoxicated teenager, Joshua Tyler, his mother Elizabeth, and his father-the pious and self-assured Reverend John C. Calhoon Tyler. Their stories are intertwined with that of the town’s abortionist, Dr. Hobson, and the histories of some of the girls, women and families who seek his care.While it is set in the 1980’s, the lessons to be learned from its scenes are as timely as, and some of the scenes may be, tomorrow’s headlines. The late author, William F. Harrison MD, was an obstetrician/gynecologist and abortion provider.

From Booklist: Inspired by the true events of his grandmother’s life and based on interviews with key figures involved with its more shocking aspects, Taylor’s fictionalization of the life of Verna Krone chronicles the explosive decades from the Depression to the dawn of the Civil Rights era [in America], as experienced by one courageous young woman. Forced by her family’s dire poverty into a life of domestic servitude, Verna is endowed with stalwart ambition, a drive that will eventually place her in nursing school and bring her to the employ of Dr. Crampton, a black physician providing illegal but safe abortion services to hundreds of compromised young women. Crampton and Krone are eventually arrested for their activities, victims of the political, moral, and racial prejudices of the era. While awaiting trial, Verna is motivated to take stock of her professional and personal triumphs and losses. Though burdened by a dispassionate, tell-don’t-show narrative style, Taylor nonetheless limns a sweeping representation of the most pivotal events of the past century. — Carol Haggas

Sixteen-year-old Sydney Biggs is a “good kid.” Smart, pretty, self-aware. No one doubts that she’ll go far in life. But, lately her mother worries that Sydney is wandering down the wrong path and getting all caught up in petty teenage rebellion and shenanigans. When Sydney and her best friend Natalia “borrow” a car to go to a party and then get escorted home by the police, their parents pack them up and ship them off to a hard-love wilderness camp—to stop this behavior before it gets out of hand, before things go too far. The problem is, they already have. Sydney—the “good kid”—is pregnant. In the wilds of Canada, where the girls are to spend the next four weeks canoeing, camping and foraging for food, time is ticking, because Sydney isn’t sure what she wants to do about her pregnancy. And she certainly isn’t expecting the other heady issues that will confront her as she forges friendships with her adventure-mates, including a guy who makes it no secret that he is a major thug and a teen television heartthrob with a secret of his own, not to mention her own best friend – who is very adamant about what Sydney should do.

In the mid-21st century, a young woman in Texas awakens to a nightmare: her skin has been genetically altered, turned bright red as punishment for the crime of having an abortion. A powerful reimagining of The Scarlet Letter, When She Woke is a timely fable about a stigmatized woman struggling to navigate an America of the not-too-distant future, where the line between church and state has been eradicated, and convicted felons are no longer imprisoned and rehabilitated but “chromed” and released back into the population to survive as best they can. In seeking a path northward to safety, through an alien and hostile world, Hannah unknowingly embarks on a journey of self-discovery that forces her to question the values she once held true and the righteousness of a country that politicizes faith and love.

Unplanned Choices is a coming-of-age historical romantic drama, set in the late 1960s and early 1970s in New York City and Long Island during the turbulent period of the Vietnam War,the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, the civil rights struggle, and the quest for legalizing abortion. The novel is the story of Steve Lynch and his first love, Anna Marino. Both Anna and Steve are raised in the Roman Catholic faith and struggle with the church’s prohibition of sexual activity and their growing sexual drives. They both meet in college after abandoning the church. Anna became pregnant and died during an abortion, before abortion on demand became legal in New York. The novel describes the impact of the abortion on Steve, the abortionist, Anna’s family and friends, and one NYPD investigator who committed murder. If Anna could have legally had an abortion, she would not have died and the impact on the other characters in the novel would not have been as tragic. Situations similar to that portrayed in Unplanned Choices, could be replicated hundreds of thousands of times in the future if abortion becomes illegal or is severely restricted in the United States.

A brilliant rendering of a scandalous historical figure, Kate Manning’s My Notorious Life is an ambitious, thrilling novel introducing Axie Muldoon, a fiery heroine for the ages. Axie’s story begins on the streets of 1860s New York. The impoverished child of Irish immigrants, she grows up to become one of the wealthiest and most controversial women of her day. In vivid prose, Axie recounts how she is forcibly separated from her mother and siblings, apprenticed to a doctor, and how she and her husband parlay the sale of a few bottles of “Lunar Tablets for Female Complaint” into a thriving midwifery business. Flouting convention and defying the law in the name of women’s reproductive rights, Axie rises from grim tenement rooms to the splendor of a mansion on Fifth Avenue, amassing wealth while learning over and over never to trust a man who says “trust me.”

When her services attract outraged headlines, Axie finds herself on a collision course with a crusading official—Anthony Comstock, founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. It will take all of Axie’s cunning and power to outwit him in the fight to preserve her freedom and everything she holds dear. Inspired by the true history of an infamous female physician who was once called “the Wickedest Woman in New York,” My Notorious Life is a mystery, a family saga, a love story, and an exquisitely detailed portrait of nineteenth-century America.

From Salon.com: Barnette is the pen name for author and blogger Jenny Trout. This is the second in “The Boss” series, which finds 24-year-old protagonist Sophie Scaife pregnant and estranged from her billionaire boyfriend, Neil, who’s twice her age (yes, he’s a billionaire; no, he’s not as robotic as Christian Grey). At the end of the previous novel, “The Boss,” Sophie makes it clear that she doesn’t want to be pregnant, and adoption isn’t right for her. “The Girlfriend” opens with Sophie having already scheduled her abortion appointment on her own. When she does tell Neil, even though he isn’t as resolute in wanting to end the pregnancy, he is fully supportive, joining her at her appointment and supporting her every step of the way.

There’s a storm brewing in the quiet town of Litchfield. A whirlwind of media attention, political debate, and anger is about to sweep through and hold the fate of three women captive.

In the eye of the storm are sixteen-year-old Clara Mahoney, a lonesome girl living in a family strained by autism; Pia Fernandez, a battered wife who wants only to escape her abusive husband; and, Loren Elliot, a forty-three-year-old who can barely make ends meet with two kids in college and a husband who just lost his job. Though these women are very different, they have a great deal in common. They are each unexpectedly pregnant, scared, and in positions where they cannot devote themselves to a child. And, they all have appointments at the same abortion clinic in Litchfield.

But getting there won’t be easy. Anti-choice forces—headed by a vain socialite and a self-indulgent priest—are mounting a demonstration against the clinic. Can these desperate women brave the chaos? Or will they let the public dictate their private decisions?

Nancy Mullion, an obstetrician-gynecologist whose botched surgery has put a patient in a life-threatening coma, must face a medical tribunal to determine if she can continue to practice medicine. Nancy’s fears about both her patient’s chances for survival and whether she will be “undoctored” are made palpable to the reader. Throughout four weeks of intense questioning and accusations, this physician directly confronts for the first time her work as an abortion provider–how it helps the lives of others but takes a heavy toll on her own.

Interweaving memories of Nancy’s English and American childhood and adolescence, Dirty Work creates an emotionally charged portrait of one woman’s life; the telling of seemingly untellable stories sets her free, as it can all women. Gabriel Weston has given us a truly original, courageous, and meaningful novel.

From Salon.com: Set in 1989, this teen romance finds protagonist Quinn discovering she’s pregnant about halfway through the book, despite having used condoms with her ex-boyfriend, Jason. She’s also already started dating a new guy, Seth, whom she does tell, along with her best friend and her mother, who’s disappointed but firmly supportive; she opts to not tell her father. Her mother drives her to the clinic, where Seth helps them navigate the protesters trying to block their way. Quinn meets with an abortion counselor who prescribes her the pill, even though having sex again is the last thing on Quinn’s mind.

Pierson gives us a heroine who doesn’t berate herself for having gotten pregnant, comes to terms with having judged other girls for doing so, and lets the burgeoning sexual tension between Quinn and Seth unfold at a slower pace than it would have otherwise, since Quinn is understandably hesitant about having sex again. While her abortion certainly affects her, especially her political views, which contrast with her father’s around the issue, aside from her holding off on sex with Seth, she quickly becomes swept up in other dramas that are far more pressing.

This nonjudgmental, even humorous, graphic work of nonfiction follows two women through the abortion process.

Not Funny Ha-Ha is a bold, slightly wry graphic novel illustrating the lives of two young women from different cultural, family, and financial backgrounds who go through two different abortions (medical and surgical). It follows them through the process of choosing a clinic, reaching out to friends, partners, and/or family, and eventually the procedure(s) itself. It simply shows what happens when a woman goes through it, no questions asked. Despite the fact that so many women and girls have abortions every day, in every city, all around us, it can be a lonely experience. Although the subject matter is heavy, the illustrations are light. The author takes a step back from putting forth any personal opinion whatsoever, simply laying out the events and possible emotional repercussions that could, and often do occur.

Addie has always known what she was running toward. In cross-country, in life, in love. Until she and her boyfriend—her sensitive, good-guy boyfriend—are careless one night and she ends up pregnant. Addie makes the difficult choice to have an abortion. And after that—even though she knows it was the right decision for her—nothing is the same anymore. She doesn’t want anyone besides her parents and her boyfriend to know what happened; she doesn’t want to run cross-country; she can’t bring herself to be excited about anything. Until she reconnects with Juliana, a former teammate who’s going through her own dark places.

Hermione Winters is captain of her cheerleading team, and in tiny Palermo Heights, this doesn’t mean what you think it means. At PHHS, the cheerleaders don’t cheer for the sports teams; they are the sports team—the pride and joy of a small town. The team’s summer training camp is Hermione’s last and marks the beginning of the end of…she’s not sure what. She does know this season could make her a legend. But during a camp party, someone slips something in her drink. And it all goes black.

In every class, there’s a star cheerleader and a pariah pregnant girl. They’re never supposed to be the same person. Hermione struggles to regain the control she’s always had and faces a wrenching decision about how to move on. The rape wasn’t the beginning of Hermione Winter’s story and she’s not going to let it be the end. She won’t be anyone’s cautionary tale.

Middenrammers is a brave and provocative novel about one doctor’s battle for social justice in Sweport, a small fishing town in England.

It’s 1968. In Paris and Berlin, student protests are resulting in a full-on workers’ revolt. Medical student Brian Davis is at the centre of it all. Meanwhile, in East Yorkshire, folk hero Lillian Bilocca is spearheading a revolution to ensure safer working conditions for fishermen. Sweport local Helena Woods (known to everyone as “Woodie”) is marching along beside her. Two years later, Dr. Brian Davis arrives at Sweport Maternity Hospital as a young doctor, intending to leave his days of protest behind him. But then he meets Woodie, a midwife who has a fire in her belly, an insatiable desire for social justice, and a deep-rooted connection with her community. Dr. Davis and Woodie are faced with hospital administrators who are doing everything in their power to prevent the staff from giving contraceptive advice or abortions. As a doctor and a midwife, the pair comes face-to-face with these destructive policies on a daily basis. In simply trying to do what is right for the patients and the town, they find themselves in the midst of a different kind of revolution.

It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother’s recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor’s son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it’s not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance—and the subsequent cover-up—will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt.

Here’s what Lauren knows: she’s not like other girls. She also knows it’s problematic to say that – what’s wrong with girls? She’s even fancied some in the past. But if you were stuck in St Agnes, her posh all-girls school, you’d feel like that too. Here everyone’s expected to be Perfect Young Ladies, it’s even a song in the painfully awful musical they’re putting on this year. And obviously said musical is directed by Lauren’s arch nemesis.

Under it all though, Lauren’s heart is bruised. Her boyfriend thinks she’s crazy and her best friend has issues of her own… so when Lauren realises she’s facing every teenage girl’s worst nightmare, she has nowhere to turn. Maybe she should just give in to everything. Be like other girls. That’s all so much easier … right?

A History of Running Away follows three women at different stages of their lives: Jasmine, a female boxer who falls foul of a ban on the sport in 1980s Ireland; a gynaecologist in present-day Dublin, who is increasingly frustrated by the constitutional ban on abortion; and Ali, in Maryland, whose mother has recently died and escapes from the grandparents she didn’t know she had.

From Claire Hennessy: The sweet, gently comic narrative of a country girl in the Big Schmoke that is Dublin seems innocent and delightful at first but then delves into deeper issues. The ever-relatable Aisling must deal with her father’s failing health, but her new flatmate has another problem to tackle: she’s pregnant. The flatmate decides to reveal this, of course, while down for the weekend with Aisling’s lovely family. And in a moment that is among the most powerful of the novel, Aisling’s mammy reveals why she doesn’t have a problem with the flatmate wanting to terminate the pregnancy. Sure didn’t she have an abortion herself? In sharing this with Aisling, and the reader, her mammy challenges the stereotypical idea of who has abortions.

Aisling is twenty-eight and she’s a complete … Aisling. She lives at home in Ballygobbard (or Ballygobackwards, as some gas tickets call it) with her parents and commutes to her good job at PensionsPlus in Dublin. Aisling goes out every Saturday night with her best friend Majella, who is a bit of a hames (she’s lost two phones already this year – Aisling has never lost a phone). Aisling spends two nights a week at her boyfriend John’s. He’s from down home and was kiss number seventeen at her twenty-first. But Aisling wants more.

“Red Clocks” imagines a near future in which America’s laws have changed — by federal decree, abortion is illegal in all 50 states. Unwilling to risk alienating a major trading partner, Canada has agreed to shore up “the Pink Wall” of its southern border, and arrest and extradite women trying to enter the country to have an abortion. In vitro fertilization has also been outlawed, and soon to take effect is new legislation, entitled “Every Child Needs Two,” that will prevent single women from adopting children. “Red Clocks” follows four women living in a small town in Oregon as they grapple with this new reality.

‘Myself and Hugh . . . We’re taking a break.”A city-with-fancy-food sort of break?’ If only. Amy’s husband Hugh says he isn’t leaving her. He still loves her, he’s just taking a break – from their marriage, their children and, most of all, from their life together. Six months to lose himself in south-east Asia. And there is nothing Amy can say or do about it. Yes, it’s a mid-life crisis, but let’s be clear: a break isn’t a break up – yet . . . However, for Amy it’s enough to send her – along with her extended family of gossips, misfits and troublemakers – teetering over the edge. For a lot can happen in six-months. When Hugh returns if he returns, will he be the same man she married? And will Amy be the same woman? Because if Hugh is on a break from their marriage, then isn’t she?